


Cold Blooded, Iron Hearted

by LittleRedWolfe (orphan_account), Sensinister



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AKA Slow Burn, And somehow Managed to Blow a dart into my own Foot, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, But Not the Point, DISCLAIMER: I Do Not Own Anything., De-aged tony, Except that one time i didn't Realize the dart was bent, I Only own my creativity and my Darts, I do This Thing Where I Blow Darts Blindfolded at a wall covered in Ideas and Roll With It, I'm being Purposely Vague and Annoying, In Order to not Confuse Chapters written with Tony Stark are Present, It's awesome, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Mechanical Limbs, Slow To Update, Slow as a Sassy Snail Fire Burning Underwater, Soldier Tony, Stan Lee and Mavel Own Everything., Story Switches Between Past and Present, Tattooed Tony, Time Travel, Tony Spies on Hydra, Tony Stark Does What He Wants, Tony Stark Doesn't Like Being Handed Things, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark is not the most Reliable Narrator, Tony-centric, and Chapters written with Antonio "Tony" Carbonell are Past, it's a long story, you'll get used to it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:55:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3583668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/LittleRedWolfe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sensinister/pseuds/Sensinister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On May 04, 2012, the Battle of Manhattan took place, and Tony Stark died when the portal closed with him on the wrong side. October 05, 2015, at 07:35 in the morning, a portal opened  up in the Avenger's tower, dropping a man no one expected to see again into his own kitchen.</p><p>Anthony Edward Stark sat on his own kitchen counter, dressed in strange clothes, a shit eating grin on his face. “Boy,” He said, “Do I got a story to tell you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Tease of a Prologue

**~*~~*~~*~~*~**  
  
**Author: Sensinister**  
  
**Title: Cold Blooded, Iron Hearted**  
  
**Chapter 00: This Shitty Little Tease of a Prologue**  
  
**~*~**  
  
Here were the facts.  
  
On May 04, 2012, the Battle of Manhattan took place, saving New York and arguably the whole World from subjugation and a life of kneeling at a crazed God’s feet. The Avengers fought bravely, in a battle that only lasted about a few hours, and though there were very few casualties, the Avengers lost one member.  
  
There was no lost love between the Avengers and Anthony Edward Stark, but his bravery and willingness to sacrifice himself to save them from the nuclear war head made them realize there was more to him than they knew. The portal closed before Iron Man got to the other side, effectively killing the billionaire genius philanthropist, and Pepper Potts inherited all of Stark’s assets, as per his will.  
  
Pepper believed Tony would want the Avengers together, safe under his roof, and no one was willing to go against her. The majority of the tower had been locked down by JARVIS, who had  his own protocols for the event of Tony’s death or disappearance. The AI warned them that, in the event five years exactly had passed since Tony’s last communication, he would shut down all function.  Despite all this, they were welcome in the Tower.  
  
A lot happened. Time passed. Pepper remarried Happy Hogan. Loki was proven innocent and moved into the tower.  
  
Three years after the Battle, Sam Wilson, the recently discovered living Phil Coulson, and one very messed up recovering assassin super soldier named James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes also moved into the Tower.  
  
For two months James Barnes would wander the empty rooms that had been off limit since Tony’s death, wondering why the pictures of Anthony Stark look so familiar, but unwilling to ask Steve in case he was projecting memories on to the face of a dead man. Two months of living in the Avenger's tower, and James finally made his first venture out into the common floor to attempt to have breakfast with the many inhabitants of the tower, only because he was tired of the begging and sad looks Steve was giving him.  
  
It was October 05, 2015, at 07:35 in the morning, when a bright blue portal opened in the ceiling and spat out a man dressed head to toe in black red and gold, before closing in on itself. The man wore a helmet over his head, which he removed, causing everyone in the room to freeze. A face from that past which Bucky had not seen in many long years stared back at him. He suddenly knew exactly why Anthony was so familiar.  
  
Anthony Edward Stark sat on his own kitchen counter, dressed in strange clothes, a shit eating grin on his face.  
  
“Boy,” He said, “Do I got a story to tell you.”


	2. Ready, Game, Set

**~*~~*~~*~~*~**

**Author: Sensinister**

**Title: Cold Blooded, Iron Hearted**

**Chapter: 01 - Ready, Game, Set**

**~*~**

_It took two weeks to legally resurrect Tony Stark. This was not because SHIELD was incompetent, they could have had everything taken care of only a few moments after his unexpected arrival into the Avenger filled tower, but more do to the fact they did not believe him at first, despite JARVIS's insistence that the man claiming to be Tony Stark was indeed Tony Stark. Why should they? To their knowledge, Anthony Edward Stark died three years and a little over four months prior. It did nothing to help that he didn't look the same, that he had somehow lost twenty or so years of age, and gained it all back inside his world worn eyes. It helped even less that Bucky recognized him for reasons they couldn't understand, leading them to believe he was a HYDRA agent until the evidence piled up, and it became impossible to deny that he was Tony Stark._

_Then all there was left to do, was listen..._

**~*~**

Had they waited so much as a single measly second, Tony would have been on the other side of the closing portal. Funny, really, how such an insignificant bit of time could have changed everything. Tony could feel it close, as if the blue glow was corporeal, could feel his metal covered fingers brush against the non-existent portal, taste the tesseract's energy in his mouth, and then the explosion and radiation of the nuclear warhead caught up to him, and there was nothing. And everything.

It is too difficult to describe using words, fickle things that they are, because sometimes words just aren't enough.

The last remnants of the tesseracts energy swallowed him up, and though he was technically dead at the time, information came pouring through his head, like data into a computer. Not all of it was significant data, in fact the majority was stupid stuff that didn't matter, but some of it would help him in his long journey back home. The next thing he knew, he was falling.

His reintroduction to the Earth was not as peaceful as a portal opening to spit him out into his kitchen. That had taken a whole bunch of manipulation on his part. No. When the tesseract sent him back to live on Earth, it threw him back into existence. He fell out of the sky, and went crashing down through trees and a few buildings, and only his damaged suit kept him intact. Or at least mostly intact.

*****

When he woke up, he was surrounded by people dressed in old military uniforms, and his suit was lying on a table next to him with a man he did not recognize working on it. He would later learn that this man was Walter Stark. It was May 04, 1912, one-hundred years in the past.

Despite his extremely advanced suit, and the arc reactor, they did not believe his claims of being from the future. He was kept somewhere top-secret and hidden underground, where they tortured him for the better part of the next four years. He refuses to go into detail about what went on during those four years, but honestly it isn't important, but it is how he lost his left eye. They probably would not have stopped, except for the fact his grandfather, Walter Stark, had finally managed to get his suit to start working again, and after that they were more than willing to believe his claims.

After they nursed him back to health, he was put into his grandfather's care, and false records were made to explain his identity. He had no choice or say in the matter. He could not tell anyone the truth. He spent another couple weeks sitting in a dirty cell until they were utterly convinced he would not mess up.

By the time they let him out, even he was nearly convinced of his own alias's truth. He was Antonio Edward Carbonell, named after his mother. He was born and raised in Italy, because he could speak flawless Italian and his mother had been born there, and he had just moved to the united states. He was born on May 26, 1886. He was suffering from amnesia and shell-shock, to explain anything he did not understand, and why certain things made him react violently. This was who he was now, and he had no choice but to accept it.

He got the first glimpse of himself on January 01, 1917. This was when he realized he had been de-aged somehow, probably during the tesseract time-travel incident, and their choice of birth year suddenly made a whole hell of a lot more sense. To be honest he panicked, more than he had when they had used water torture in an attempt to get him to speak. Apparently they realized pretty quickly this was not the way to go, and they got creative, but that did not matter. What did matter, was that Tony had inexplicably been aged down to twenty-six again, but thankfully he had all his memories.

For his freedom, and the ability to use whatever tools they had at the time to try and build himself a time machine home, Antonio was forced to join the army. He was given a pretty high rank, so that no one would ask questions if he got away with things that were odd, and a small group of very important people were informed of his situation. He was given one month to recuperate and get familiar with his surroundings, and then he was sent to a pretty grueling private boot camp, where he would stay until April 06, 1917, when he would join the war.

*****

To be totally honest, nothing that happened before the year 1940 was of any significance.

He wishes he could say differently, but very little happened.

You see, his job was to be a ghost. A story. And nothing more. He wasn't allowed to change anything, or to warn anyone of things, and that was final. They wanted him gone almost as much as he did, but that did not stop them from taking advantage of him.

Antonio was a sniper, and a damn good one. He was trained, not to be a soldier, but to be an assassin. To be honest, Tony rather felt like James Bond, or what he imagined Clint and Natasha felt like. He was not a spy, per say, but he wasn't trained like any soldier. He was trained to be a last resort. And, while he did fight in every battle he was told to, mostly Tony sat in a secret military lab, trying to build himself a time machine to get back home. Technology just wasn't good enough, despite having Walter to help, and it was a very slow process.

It was made even more slow, when he had no choice but to destroy the time machine he had been building out of his suit to rebuild his arc reactor.

*****

It was an accident only a few months before the end of the war, caused as he pushed another soldier out of the way, and the explosion threw him face down, pushing the base of the arc reactor back into his chest, and against his spine.

He nearly died. It took four doctors to stitch back up his lungs and heart, and remove the shrapnel. He didn't have anesthesia for the procedure, much like he hadn't in the cave in Afghanistan, and when he was done, he had a huge gaping open hole in his sternum, and the need to rebuild the arc reactor for a new reason. He could not breath, his chest wouldn't expand enough, and his heart was stuttering out like a dying battery.

Without the shrapnel he had more time than he would have, but he still only had a week to build a new arc reactor, a new base, and a pacemaker. They had to saw his sternum open even more, but the doctors entrusted to the task we not Yinsen, and they could not do it as well as his original doctor. He was forced to feel everything. The saw through his ribs, the wires being wound around the remains of his rib-cage and into his heart and lungs, the cold metal cylinder lowered into his chest against his heart and lungs, and finally the electric shock as they carelessly touched the socket walls repeatedly as they lowered his arc reactor back into his chest. He felt them bolt the base into place, and them pushing putting bolts, screws, and strips of metal up and down his entire body, reinforcing the bones, ant the same time as giving his body just the right amount of electric flow to keep his lungs and heart going.

His entire body was conductor of electricity and energy, keeping the pacemaker going, and his lungs and heart breathing and beating.

He did not remember a time when his lungs and heart felt to good, where breathing was so easy, but it did not change the fact that every breath he took ended with his heart and lungs pressed tightly to metal that refused to warm up to body temperature. The wiring made a cage, making it harder to push the reactor back into his chest like the last time, but it did not change the fact that most of the wires were copper, due to the electrical compatibility, and it made Tony feel like a walking lightning rod.

*****

After World War I ended, Tony still didn't leave his lab for much.

He realized sometime around 1920 that he was not aging at all. He wasn't aging slowly, or normally, or anything. He simply was not aging.

This presented a new question, because quite frankly this realization freaked him out more than he could say. His hair was peppered with grey, but he had no age lines. Nothing to show that he was any older except a few small hints of white and silver through his black hair. It seemed to scare the people who knew about his situation even more than it scared him.

*****

He started traveling, all expenses paid by the military, in 1922. He needed new elements, new materials, anything to help create a time machine. Food was scarce, money was even more so, but Antonio made a decent living as a mechanic. He helped people fix things, mostly cars and small things like that, but the majority of his time he spent traveling.

It was in his travels he started learning to full extent of the accidental information the tesseract flowed through his head.

For example, languages. Before the incident of 2012, he had spoken a few languages. Italian, because his mother taught him. Spanish, French and Japanese, because it helped with business. German because he was curious to see what the curse words his father was saying meant. Romanian, because he'd dated a girl when he was fourteen who fancied herself a vampire, and he actually really loved her, before she slept with his best friend and outed him as bi-sexual to the world. And Dari, Pashto, Urdu, and Sindhi, from his three months in Afghanistan. Sign language in every language and region because it was fun to pretend he was just moving his hands rapidly as he talked, only to be truthfully signing that he was bored and insulting people without them knowing he was doing so. It gave him something to do to keep his interest in the boring board meetings. Now it seemed no matter what language someone through at him he could understand and respond flawlessly.

*****

But like he said, nothing really interesting happened until 1930. 

On February 02, 1930, he found out where the Tesseract was kept before HYDRA got their hands on it.

On February 14, Antonio Edward Carbonell, Anthony Edward Stark, joined HYDRA to get his hands on the only thing he realized could get him home.


End file.
